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The purpose of this paper is to add to our understanding of how external factors such as funding and external accountabilities affect the organisational inner workings, especially identity issues.

The paper is based on a comparative case study of two professional chamber orchestras, one in Sweden and one in the UK. The two orchestras had significantly different funding conditions and had different relations with funders and were thus exposed to different kinds of accountability dilemmas. The two organisations were studied using and ethnographically inspired approach. The developments of various parts of the organisations were studied, such as funding, management, strategy, management control and identity issues.

The paper illustrates how the solution to accountability dilemmas in an organisation can, over time, result in the protection or the dilution of a perceived organisational core and thus in an identity struggle. Especially, management has to deal with the balance between financial and operational accountability, where organisational members could perceive the decisions to be confirming or rejecting what they perceived as being the higher purpose of their work.

This paper may help managers become more aware of the long ranging consequences of managerial decisions and how such decisions may affect the identity orientation of organisational members.

The paper combines the concept of identity with the concept of accountability, something that has not been done to a large extent in previous research.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute with knowledge about how resistance to the neo-liberal agenda is made possible, especially through renewal and reproduction of collective communities.

Using two ethnographical studies, one of a chamber orchestra and one of a shipping company for illustrating resistance.

It is resistance through distancing and creation of a “hidden script” that prevents the collective community from be broken down by individualization. However, resistance through distancing needs to be combined with resistance through persistence in order to become intelligent.

The paper makes use of ethnographic studies to investigate possibilities of resistance. The study has also found it fruitful to combine James Scott's (1990) notion of collectively created hidden scripts with Collinson's (1992, 1994) notion of resistance through distancing and persistence.